walikum assalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu ! Jazakallah Khair for pointing this out ! I should have pointed this out myself - The article even though written by an orientalist, I think is a fairly good work of research. the rest of the site, as you noted has little worthwhile. wassalam --abu nibras
Assalamulikum WR WB, Isn't that site run by dodgy non islamic sufi claimants, strolling through the site you get that impression and also I have heard of this Illweyn and his wife. However the article seems good, but I just wanted to warn people against the sites claim to sufism.
Malâmatî Movement in Early Sufism One of the most fascinating and illuminating chapters in the his-tory of these formative years is that of the Nishâpûrî 'Path of Blame', the Malâmatiyya. In any attempt to draft the early history of Islamic mysticism, the Malâmatiyya movement is indispensable. Yet it is also, and to a no lesser degree, an invaluable phenomenon in the History of Religion at large, especially for its attentiveness, its insights and its formulations pertaining to the psychological obstacles which confront any sincere seeker on the path of the spiritual quest. In the Malâmatî teaching the dialectic between the nafs (the 'lower self' and the centre of ego-consciousness) and the sirr (the innermost recesses of one's being) - the paradigmatic dialectic referred to by all mystical traditions - is carried almost ad absurdum. The Malâmatiyya represent an extremely introverted reaction to extroverted and ascetic forms of spirituality (zuhd). In the course of time this reaction took various shapes and forms, some of them utterly outstripping all religious and social norms (as, for instance, the Qalandariyya). Yet in the ninth century, the formative period with which this essay is concerned, the Malâmatî teachers seem to have proposed a system in which sincere self-scrutiny and self-criticism were interwoven into a highly acclaimed social code based on chivalry and altruism (as exemplified by the futuwwa fraternities), and in which the call for abandoning any outward marks of distinction or any inward claim to spiritual superiority meant in practice a strict adherence to the Islamic shari 'a. Read more here ............
